Food and Nutrition Service Administrator Booed Over ‘Harvest Box’ Idea

The Trump administration's controversial proposal to transform some Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (food stamps) benefits into “America's Harvest Box,” did not go over well at a national meeting of anti-hunger advocates.

“As with any innovative idea,” said Food and Nutrition Service Administrator Brandon Lipps, speaking at the Anti-Hunger Policy Conference in Washington on Monday, “there are questions to be answered and details to be worked out. We want to hear from you on this.”

He did.

Lipps was met by a chorus of boos from conference attendees when he claimed the Harvest Box program would be more “efficient” (it likely wouldn't be), and that recipients would maintain more than half of their benefits on their EBT cards so they could “supplement the staple foods in these boxes.” Some attendees even walked out of the room, and one question from the audience, about how the USDA reconciled taking away people’s foods with preserving their dignity, was drowned out by cheers and applause.

“[Agriculture] Secretary Perdue is genuinely concerned about the soon-to-be $21 trillion deficit that we have in this country,” Lipps said to more boos, and even some laughs. (According to the Congressional Budget Office, the GOP tax plan will increase the deficit by $1.4 trillion to deliver tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy.)

The recently released 2018 president's budget proposes cutting SNAP by $213.5 billion over the next decade. The idea of delivering boxes of government commodity food to SNAP recipients in the form of so-called Harvest Boxes was met with fierce criticism from anti-poverty advocates.

Conference attendee Denalerie Johnson-Faniel, director of the Mercer Street Friends Food Bank in Trenton, New Jersey, told the Prospect that the Harvest Box idea is “antiquated” and that the USDA “didn’t put enough time and energy” into actually coming up an innovative proposal. She points to the nutrition issue with the boxes, highlighting the sodium present in government foods and how the box doesn’t provide fresh produce.

“It takes away the voice of the American citizen,” Johnson-Faniel says. “People should have a decision in what they eat.”

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